There are those who denounce us openly to their own friends, and yet whisper us softly that Senator Douglas is the aptest instrument there is with which to effect that object.  They wish us to infer all, from the fact that he now has a little quarrel with the present head of the dynasty, and that he has regularly voted with us on a single point, upon which he and we have never differed.  They remind us that he is a great man, and that the largest of us are very small ones.  Let this be granted.  But “a living dog is better than a dead lion.”  Judge Douglas, if not a dead lion, for this work is at least a caged and toothless one.  How can he oppose the advances of slavery?  He don’t care anything about it.  His avowed mission is impressing the “public heart” to care nothing about it.  A leading Douglas Democratic newspaper thinks Douglas’s superior talent will be needed to resist the revival of the African slave-trade.  Does Douglas believe an effort to revive that trade is approaching?  He has not said so.  Does he really think so?  But if it is, how can he resist it?  For years he has labored to prove it a sacred right of white men to take negro slaves into the new Territories.  Can he possibly show that it is less a sacred right to buy them where they can be bought cheapest?  And unquestionably they can be bought cheaper in Africa than in Virginia.  He has done all in his power to reduce the whole question of slavery to one of a mere right of property; and, as such, how can he oppose the foreign slave-trade—­how can he refuse that trade in that “property” shall be “perfectly free”—­unless he does it as a protection to the home production?  And as the home producers will probably not ask the protection, he will be wholly without a ground of opposition.

Senator Douglas holds, we know, that a man may rightfully be wiser to-day than he was yesterday; that he may rightfully change when he finds himself wrong.  But can we, for that reason, run ahead, and infer that he will make any particular change, of which he himself has given no intimation?  Can we safely base our action upon any such vague inference?  Now, as ever, I wish not to misrepresent Judge Douglas’s position, question his motives, or do aught that can be personally offensive to him.  Whenever, if ever, he and we can come together on principle so that our cause may have assistance from his great ability, I hope to have interposed no adventitious obstacle.  But clearly he is not now with us; he does not pretend to be—­he does not promise ever to be.

Our cause, then, must be intrusted to and conducted by its own undoubted friends—­those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work, who do care for the result.  Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong.  We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us.  Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements we gathered